A person’s concept of privacy, says University of Hawaii scholar Scott Robertson, may depend on their generation, but even a basic attitude can change over time, too.

Hawaii folks have been thinking a lot about privacy lately. The state has been in the throes of bringing more of its public records online for the past few years, but more recently the divide between public and private information has become blurred in a far less theoretical, more personal way.

Of course, it’s the case of Edward Snowden that has swept up a lot of people here, in the information-technology world or out of it, all the more so because he was a Hawaii resident. A recent hire at a Honolulu office for a government contractor, Snowden is now infamous for his stunning decision to leak information about the National Security Agency surveillance program, which draws from the phone and Internet records of the American population.

Robertson, associate professor at the University of Hawaii’s Information and Computer Sciences department, is one of those fascinated by the issues raised in the current security-versus-privacy debate. He directs the Hawaii Computer-Human Interaction Lab, a research team that has occasion to contemplate the effect of technology on human behavior. And although no current projects concern privacy, he is surrounded by colleagues who give it a lot of thought.

"There’s a big generational difference in the way people feel about privacy," he said. "A digital native is much less concerned about privacy, for a bunch of reasons.

"One is that it’s just the context they grew up in," Robertson added. "They’re used to living in public. In a way, it’s a throwback to when people lived in smaller communities."

At the same time, younger people seem less interested in seeing Snowden prosecuted for the leak.

A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center showed that of those age 18-29, 60 percent felt American citizens are well-served by having the knowledge he provided.

Underscoring the national ambivalence on the issue, a previous survey from Pew showed that 56 percent of Americans said they consider the NSA program of tracking telephone records and Internet data to be "acceptable" as a means of investigating terrorism. However, Pew officials noted a considerable segment — 41 percent — who found it unacceptable.

Some of the critics count themselves as tea party loyalists, according to Pew; some who are baby boomers or older likely were influenced by the government distrust that prevailed during the 1960s and Watergate eras. Now in the Internet age, they may still try to avoid being tracked online or through other digital trails.

It’s the impulse to protect the U.S. Bill of Rights that’s behind the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed June 11, charging that the federal program violates Americans’ constitutional rights of free speech, association and privacy. Government officials have said their collections are limited to "metadata" — a broad sweep of information, not tied to individual names — until a special court allows a closer, individualized inspection.

But, ACLU officials have argued, even this data is enough to draw a fairly detailed picture of people’s private lives.

Beyond the formal context of a lawsuit, resistance to online tracking persists in some circles.

"I know a lot of conscientious objectors to Facebook," said Ryan Ozawa, best known for the Hawaii Public Radio show he co-hosts with Burt Lum — the "geeks in residence" on the Bytemarks Cafe radio magazine. "I know people who, well, they feel Safeway shouldn’t know what they are buying," he said, a reference to the supermarket chain’s shopper loyalty program that’s based on a card swiped with each purchase.

"There is definitely a counter-movement to this trend … but I would say they’re in the minority," Ozawa added. "There’s so much data out there. And look at the private commercial data collection, information that we give away. We’re the biggest leak — it’s not Snowden."

However, the attacks of 9/11 surely eroded some of the resistance among even that minority of techno-critics, Robertson said. Even the characteristic baby boomer critique of government cracked, he said, when the towers came down. If terrorism required vigilance, and most people thought it did, using technology to heighten defenses seemed the rational response.

NSA officials attributed the disruption of numerous terrorism attacks to its surveillance approach in giving its defense of the program.

But none of this hasn’t stilled the current public outcry, said Lum, who acknowledged that he shared these concerns.

"It’s one thing to put stuff out there as public on your own," he said. "The discussion that’s taking place now is, where along the way did we give up our rights, to have these companies give the information to the government?

"If the citizens feel that is something they want to give up in return for government protection, then I think we’re moving down this path of giving up all our privacy," he said.

One problem is that people like Snowden have been given scant popular support, he added, and without a society that encourages whistleblowers, there will be no way citizens will be able to push back against government intrusion in the future.

"There’s a certain amount of knowledge they are being afforded because of this whistleblower now," Lum said, "but if people have this blase attitude, you’re falling into the hands of where the government wants you."

He acknowledged that the privacy issue doesn’t drive opinion as powerfully among citizens who don’t feel too threatened yet: "You can’t convince everyone," he said, "but you can keep the fight going."

Lum straddles a line between this kind of civil-liberties protective stance and a desire to work with government to make it more accessible, transparent and responsive.

That’s what powered the passage of the "Open Data" legislation, House Bill 632, in the past session (see adjoining story, page F4). Advocates such as Lum, who is also executive director of the nonprofit Hawaii Open Data, argue that public information should be made open to citizens online and to the technology sector of businesses that hope to develop smart-phone applications and other innovations that can make the data easier to use.

In the early stages of the bill’s move through committees, though, its supporters had to fend off concerns that Open Data would make everything public, Lum said. In fact, the bill expressly limits the state from going online with anything other than records that are already public documents.

As a legal principle, privacy has its limits. The courts have found that a "reasonable expectation of privacy" must exist to make a claim of Fourth Amendment protection, and have concluded that it generally doesn’t when people have "knowingly exposed" information to a third party, such as a bank or a telephone company.

Kenneth Lawson is associate director of the Hawaii Innocence Project and an associate faculty specialist at the William S. Richardson School of Law. He said that the founders saw the need to bar unwarranted search and seizure because such governmental abuses were common in the society that they’d fled.

"When you think of the Fourth Amendment, it started for these reasons," he said. "There’s something offensive about government being able to listen in on conversations of citizens when there’s no reason to believe we’re engaged in illegal activity.

"It’s amazing how many people are willing to accept it," Lawson added. "And if you tie it to 9/11 and I speak out against it, I’m made to feel I’m not patriotic."

Robertson said that regardless of how people assess Snowden’s act, the discussion about privacy that it generated is a healthy one.

"Those are the things we should think about," he said. "As citizens we have a duty to think about it. And it doesn’t mean we’re paranoid; we’re thinking ahead."